Empig, Heevin' Steven, The White Bear, and other nicknames I've had...

I'm glad this 1986 news clip featuring Maurice Meyer is one of the videos still around 35 years later.  Maurice, aka, Drob, is one of the coolest people from the 80's BMX freestyle world.  He's the NorCal pro I actually talked to the most in my time up there, along with Robert Peterson.  This video was shot at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, in the summer of 1986, and it's the only video of me riding in the 80's.  To be clear, I was never a Curb Dog or part of the Ground Control team, but I hung out and rode with these guys on the weekends in 1985-1986.  Along with Maurice, you can see Chris and Karl Rothe, Mark McKee, Tim Traecy (doing a backyard a year before the trick got popular), and Darcy Langlois.  I'm the dork chasing my bike at 5:07, a trick I did in parades while living in Idaho.  As far as I know, I was nicknameless for that year.  It's about the only time I didn't have some nickname going.

When you're a dorky kid, you usually get tagged with a nickname, and not a very good one.  I was a chubby, unathletic kid growing up, moving from town to town around rural Ohio.  I changed schools nearly every year, and I never told the new kids the nicknames I got tagged with at the previous school.  But my last name is an unusual, short, German background name, Emig.  Teachers almost always mispronounced it EE-mig, with a long E sound.  Then I'd correct the teacher (never a great way to start in a new school), and say "No, it's Em-ig, like the letter "M," then "ig."  And the teacher would still call me EEE-mig, for the first couple of weeks.  

I was kind of fat, so at school after school, I got tagged with Empig, by the other kids.  I'm not sure why, but in Ohio in the 1970's, we rarely called each other by our first names, we called each other by our last names, and those often got turned into nicknames.  Empig was a pretty easy one to figure out, and school after school, that became my nickname, after the first few days.  At Willard Junior High, in Willard, Ohio (Go Flashes!), Emicrud was another variation someone came up with.  

I played football poorly in 8th grade at Willard.  I was always really short for my age, but chubby.  Since I wasn't really into team sports, but I wanted to not suck at one, I signed up for football.  I played right guard, though after practice I probably smelled more like a left sock.  One day while practicing blocking, the coaches split up the little guys and the big guys.  I was short like the little scrawny guys, so I practiced against them at first.  They were small and wiry, and bounced off me.  For some reason, one of the coaches, said something like, "Hey, Steve's kind of stocky, let's try him against the big guys."  So I got in the line to practice blocking the bigger, athletic guys, the ones who scared the shit out of me every day in the hallways. 

Being short, there was no way I could stop them with standard blocking techniques (forearms and elbows, no grabbing in those days).  So when I lined up against one of our team's good running backs, I reverted to my backyard football style.  When the whistle blew, I dove sideways at his knees and he fell over me onto the ground.  This amused the coaches, who had me pegged as the unathletic pussy that I really was.  But I knew it was easy to knock big guys down by just taking them out at the knees.  So I did it over and over that day.  By the end of the practice, the coaches were calling me The Mighty Midget.  That was the first cool nickname I ever had.  

In our next game, with my newfound nickname and unorthodox blocking style, I got more time playing.  I kept taking out a big linebacker, just long enough so our backs could get out of the pocket.  The coaches and guys loved it, and were rooting for me on the sidelines.  So the other team double teamed me.  Then I took both defenders out, put them on the ground the same way.  Although I was deathly afraid of physical pain as a kid, with all the football pads, it didn't really hurt to dive into guys knees, and have them fall over me onto the ground.  Eventually the other coach triple teamed me, and I took all three guys out with my sideways dive.  I got pulled out after that, and patted on the back on the sidelines, with guys yelling, "The Mighty Midget!"  For a kid who sucked at all sports, that moment was pretty cool.  

Then all the other small kids learned to dive and block big guys, and by the end of the season, everyone small got called the Mighty Midget at some point.  I gave up on football, and went back to just being Empig or Emicrud.

In Boise I got into BMX, jumping, then racing, then freestyle, which was just turning into its own sport in 1983-84.  To my high school friends, I was usually just Emig, no nickname.  My family moved to San Jose, California, in 1985, the year after I graduated high school.  I went from having a couple of good freestylers to ride with in Boise, to having about a dozen really good riders, they guys in the video above, plus the rest of the NorCal crew, from September 1985 through July 1986.  I improved a lot, and I made a zine about the NorCal freestyle scene.  As I'm written many times before, that zine, San Jose Stylin', landed me a job at BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines, beginning August 1986.  I moved into my new co-workers apartment, with Craig "Gork" Barrette, and Mark "Lew" Lewman.  Though we were all dorks by normal standards, I was the dorkiest dork of the bunch.  FREESTYLIN' editor Andy Jenkins started giving me little nicknames in the magazine by lines, like "written by E. Mig or M.Ig.  

Then one night, we had a party at our apartment.  In typical dork fashion, I drank too much beer, too early, in order to gain beer muscles and hopefully (finally) get laid.  I was still a virgin at 20, much to my dismay.  Instead, I got sick.  I jumped up off the couch, and ran to the bathroom door, trying not to puke.  The door was locked, someone was in there.  In desperation, I ran into my bedroom, slid open the window (there was no screen), and puked out my window, down the stucco wall.  Our neighbor's kitchen window was straight across from that wall, about five feet away, but lower, since beach apartment buildings take up as much land as possible, and are really close together in California.  So when they looked out their kitchen window the next morning, they saw an 8 foot long puke stain on the wall below my bedroom window.  

As I lay hungover in bed, they told Gork and Lew, "hey, looks like your roommate drank a bit too much last night."  I had to wash off the wall after my head cleared, and Gork promptly tagged me with the nickname Heevin' Steven.  It turned out there was a Garbage Pail kid card with that name, which someone found soon after, which was funny.  But Heevin' Steven has way too many syllables for daily use, so Gork just started calling me Heave.  I'm pretty sure there's a by line "by Heave Emig" somewhere in one or two of those BMX Action issues (November 1986- April 1987).  

I got laid off at the magazines, mostly because I didn't like the band Skinny Puppy, and I was a dork in general.  I went to work writing and shooting photos for the AFA newsletter, and doing a bit of everything working for Bob Morales. Bob later hired a young woman to be our receptionist, and she and I hit it off.  She was 25, and she broke me in, got me past the 21-year-old virgin plague, and we dated for several months.  She was also a singer in a local rock band, and I started trying to write some hit song lyrics for her.  In December of 1987, I got a job at Unreel Productions, the Vision Skateboard video company, and she followed, becoming the receptionist there for a while.  She was a few years older than me, and liked to party way more than me, so I was doomed.  When she eventually slept with one of my good friends, and then later dumped me, I was crushed.  I wrote a poem that night called "Journey of The White Bear."  

Three different girlfriends had said I kind of reminded them of a bear, I had a bear-like nose or something.  So in the poem, I used the metaphor The White Bear for me, and she was The Black Leopard.  She wasn't black, it was never a racial thing.  I thought of being naive as like new fallen snow, pure and white, and then once you mix it up, and get involved with people, you dig into the dark side of life (partying, sex, drugs, whatever).  You lose that naivety, you're never "pure white" and ignorant again, you've been "stained" with the heartache and dark side of relationships, and we're all some mix of black and white from then on.  That was the idea in the poem.  "Nothing's right or wrong, in our world today, nothing's black or white, it's all shades of gray," was the refrain.  I've lost all copies of that poem, and almost all of the other 400 or 500 poems I've written.  Anyhow, it turned into a pretty good poem.  But only dork's wrote poetry, in my mind, so I wrote that poem in 1988, and it sat in notebooks in my closet, with about 200 other poems, for about 4 years.  

While at Unreel Productions, my main job was making dubs, making copies of one video or another, on all kinds of formats, for everyone in the Vision empire that needed a video for something.  One day, someone visiting asked what my job was, and I said, "I'm the Dub Guy."  That became my unofficial title around Unreel, from 1988 through 1990. 

During that time, Vision closed down Unreel Productions, and I moved into the main Vision office, and didn't have much to do.  I eventually quit, and blew a bunch of money, and ran up my credit cards self-producing my own freestyle video, The Ultimate Weekend, in 1990.  I worked a while for a surf video distributor, then got on the crew of the Supercross and Monster truck TV shows in early 1991.  I got that job because Laura, a woman I worked with at Unreel, got on the crew there, in the production office.  They needed someone to log footage for a day, and she knew I was a good worker, so she called me.  I drove up to a building on Cahuenga, right across the freeway from Universal Studios, and spent ten hours watching interviews and footage of monster truck and mud racer drivers, and taking notes.  We called that "logging footage" back in those days.  I'd write down which of the three mini-interview takes was the best, and any funny lines they might say.  They asked me to come back the next day, and the next.  After about a month, I was officially a "production assistant." mostly working in the office, 5 days a week.  But I did work on four supercross events in Anaheim, San Diego, and Las Vegas, that year. 

On the first one, I ran errands around Anaheim stadium all day, for several hours before the actual supercross event in the evening.  When it came time for the actual race, John, the producer told me I'd be working with the cameramen, "pulling cable."  Yes, that sounds dirty, but it really means just coiling up the long cable behind the camerman, as he moved around the side of the track.  Think Supercorss races are fun to watch live?  You should see one from the edge of the whoops, five feet from the riders, it's epic.  Anyhow, John said, "The camera crew is eating dinner, right now, so go eat, and then work with them during the race."  I headed to the meal room, where they were having lasagna.  I'd been working my ass off all day, and I was starving, so gorged myself two big plates of lasagna, salad, and garlic bread. 

Then I met the cameraman I was working with, and he showed me what I needed to do.  I was out on the field, and as he moved around, I coiled and uncoiled the cable, to keep other people from tripping over it, or whatever.  Unfortunately, I ate too much lasagna, it was a physical job, and I really needed to go take a dump.  But there was no time, so I had a seriously upset stomach, and a seriously bad look on my face all night.  John walked by me at one point, and asked why I was mad.  I didn't tell him the truth, since I had only worked there a couple of weeks.  After seeing me with a mean look on my face, he joked and called me "Smilin' Steve."  When the race was over 3 1/2 hours later, I told the cameraman, and he told me to run and hit the restroom.  

After a much needed dump, I felt 100 times better, and helped pick up all the cables and camera equipment.  The cameraman joked, after I told him how much lasagna I ate.  He said, "Yeah, if I wasn't running around with a camera all night, I would have had a second helping, too.  But when you work on our crew, you need to eat light."  Lesson learned.  I became, "Smilin' Steve" at the office from then on.  John actually felt bad,when I told him I was sick that whole first race, and that's why I looked so mean.  He was actually one of the coolest bosses I ever worked for.

 One of my other jobs at the monster truck/supercross production office became labeling every video tape that came in, and organizing them in our "tape library," a big closet.  I was in charge of keeping track of every single tape, as they went out to edit or get copies made.  Laura knew I did this to the 3,000 poorly labels tapes at Unreel, and totally organized the place, so I got the job.  My overly uptight attitude worked well for keeping track of the various tapes coming in and out.  For those who don't know, video tapes, VHS, betamax, 3/4", betacam, whatever, are big cassettes with reals of plastic "tape," and that tape is coated in iron oxide, which is a basically a cool form of rust.  That's what the electric signals on video tape are recorded on, in the oxide on the tape.  

One day, Craig, a very loud, borderline arrogant, and funny producer, came to me to get tapes for his next edit session.  He walked into the office I was in and said, "Oh Gatekeeper of All That Is Oxide, I need a tape."  For a couple of weeks, I was nicknamed "The Gatekeeper," because I was the gatekeeper to get tapes, and kept good track of them, so they didn't get lost.  When your office produces two TV shows a week, losing footage can be a real bad thing. 

I wound up living in a flop house in North Hollywood, in late 1991, working second shift at a video duplicator, and going street riding alone every day, around the San Fernando Valley.  At that time, about 50 miles away, back in Huntington Beach, BMX racer/jumper/entrepreneur, Chris Moeller bought out his original partner, Greg Scott (The "S" in S&M Bikes, Scott & Moeller), and was running the tiny bike company from his garage.  Chris decided it was time to make an official video for S&M Bikes.  The year before I had self-produced a bike video called The Ultimate Weekend, and Chris, and a few of the S&M riders and P.O.W. House guys were in it.  He found my phone number somewhere, and called me up in North Hollywood.  Chris had this crazy idea for the first S&M Bikes video, and it sounded fun.  He started coming up and hauling me down to H.B. on the weekends, to hang out at his apartment, and shoot video footage, since I didn't have a car.  The result was the video, Feel My Leg Muscles... I'm a Racer.  I shot the footage on my RCA S-VHS camera, and Chris bought a prosumer S-VHS VCR to edit it.  Not counting the VCR, the total budget to make Leg Muscles was about $250, mostly beer money.  

As things worked out, I got fired from my job as a result of making Leg Muscles, which is a long story of its own.  That story became a BMX industry urban legend for years, getting crazier with each retelling.   I'll save that for another day.  Anyhow, I wound up sleeping on the floor of Chris' tiny, "Winnebago" apartment in Huntington Beach.  He called it the Winnebago because the whole apartment was 8 feet wide, with almost no windows.  So it felt like we were living in a motorhome.  A guy named Shaggy had the small couch in the living room, I slept on the floor, Chris had the one bedroom, and S&M Bikes was run out of the garage.  It was a weird scene, with lots of punk rock on cassette, ramen noodles, slices of pizza at Papa Joe's, cheap beer, and riding in the afternoons and nights.  

One morning in 1992, Chris walked out of his room, talking about this cool book he just got of Henry Rollins' poetry.  One poem in particular, was about Rollins doing what single guys do when alone, while looking in the bathroom mirror.  I'd never polished the old rocket while standing at the bathroom sink, looking in the mirror, but Rollins said in the poem, "I look in the mirror, and see Superman... sort of."  When Chris finished the book, called Black Coffee Blues, I believe, he loaned it to me.  I read Rollins' poems.  Henry Rollins is a smart guy, and the poetry was real raw and cool.  Suddenly, being a "poet" seemed much less lame.  Knowing I had a couple hundred poems hidden away in notebooks, I said, "I could write a poem book like this.  Hell, I already have written more poems than this."  

I got my notebooks out of storage, along with my typewriter, and edited and typed up a huge zine of nearly 100 of my poems.  The zine was so thick, I had to bind it with duct tape, staples wouldn't go through it all, it had like 60 or 70 zine pages.  It took over a month to get it all together and published.  The zine of poetry was called "We're on the Same Mental Plane... and it's Crashing."  I drew a bad picture of a brain riding on top of a 747 airplane while it crashed for the cover.  

I gave the first copy to Chris Moeller, pretty sure he would find a lot to make fun of me with in it. Much to my surprise he came out his room the next morning and said it really surprised him, it was so honest and kind of raw.  Not as cool as Henry Rollins' poems, but better than he expected.  That was the first day.  I think it was the next day, he started giving me a hard time, saying "I am The White Bear and she is the tigress."  I said, "No she's the black leopard, it's a metaphor."  The word cougar to describe a woman dating younger guys hadn't become a thing yet, but that girlfriend definitely had that feline quality.  Anyhow, day after day, Chris kept calling me The White Bear.  Then people in our group of friends started calling me The White Bear.  It was always THE White Bear, not just White Bear.  

When Chris Moeller tags you with a nickname, he keeps pushing it until it sticks.  Ask Belt Buckle Barry, Porta John, or Child Molester Gary.  So I became The White Bear to the BMX world of the 1990's.  Chris' girlfriend at the time, Shelly, would come out in the mornings when she slept over, heading off to work, and have to step over me in my sleeping bag,since the living room walkway was so small.  Every morning she'd say, "Morning The White Bear," and I'd look up, "Morning Shelly." as she stepped over me.  

At some point in 1992, I can't remember why, I moved into the P.O.W. House, the Pros of Westminster.  The house then was Dave Clymer, Alan Foster, John Paul Rogers, Lawan Cunningham, Chris Sales, Jay Lonergan, Scotty, Bill Naggy, John Salamne, and probably someone I'm forgetting.  I think Todd Lyons had just moved out, but he hung out there almost every night.  Most of the time I lived there, I worked as furniture mover part time.  So while everyone else slept in hung over, I'd get up kind of early, go out to the nasty brown Lazy Boy recliner in the back yard, and read books in the morning sun.  When I was at the house, I'd just sit in one place reading a lot.  At some point, someone started calling me Sluggo.  apparently because I just sat there like a slug, I guess.  But nobody told me that they called me Sluggo behind my back.  

I moved out, and then back a few months later, after working the summer on the American Gladiators crew.  Alan's little brother, Brian Foster was living in the house then, as well.  Keith Treanor never lived there, but hung out most nights, and went riding with all of us daily.  One day we were heading out to ride somewhere, and Keith said, "Hey Sluggo, you coming?"  The other guys looked weird for a minute.  "Nobody knows we call him Sluggo," someone said.  "Keith was like, "Really?"  He looked at me and laughed, "Damn, we've been calling you Sluggo for almost a year now."  I laughed it off.  After all the other nicknames, it didn't phase me.  When I'd practice with my nunchucks at the house after that, I told them I was practicing Sluggitsu, the Way of the Slug, you look so pathetic no one wants to fuck with you.  That got a few laughs.

So in most of the BMX world, to this day, I get called The White Bear.  If I run into Todd Lyons, Alan Foster, or Brian Foster, they'll still call me Sluggo.  Since The White Bear actually sounded kind of cool, I took it as my pen name when I published poetry, and some zines.  As the old saying goes, I don't really care what people call me, just don't call me late for dinner.  

Why I'm focusing on small business and creativity these days: The 2013 Oxford "Future of Work" report

 

Here's a 1 1/2 hour talk on the 2013 Oxford University report, "The Future of Work."  Among other findings, the researchers estimated that 47% of U.S. jobs could be lost to new forms of technology from 2013 to 2038.  The U.S. "workforce" is about 165 million people, officially, and 47% of that would mean about 75 to 80 million Americans will lose their jobs to some form of new technology over this 25 year period.  That's a lot of people.  That's why I feel this issue, and small businesses, as one major solution, deserve a lot of attention.

When I was a kid in the 1970's, my dad would pull into a "service station," what gas stations were still often called back then, and a man would walk out to our car.  I'm not talking a high school kid, but it was usually a grown man, who had a family he supported.  That man would not only pump our gas, but he would clean the windows, and offer to check the oil, for free, while pumping the gas.  This was a normal thing every time we got gas, back when gas was about 50-55 cents a gallon.  That man usually would spend part of the day in the garage, repairing cars, as well.  Those men working at gas stations made a decent living back then, pumping gas and fixing cars.  In those days, gas stations weren't mini-marts, and people rarely went into the stations, usually my parents would pay while sitting in the car.  

Obviously now, we have self service gas pumps, and we pump our own gas, which is now $3 per gallon, and $4 a gallon here in California.  Those gas pump jobs are long gone.  The new technology (in the 1970's) of self-serve gas pumps, was a major factor in replacing those gas station attendant jobs.  In a similar fashion, ATM machines replaced hundreds of thousands of bank teller jobs in later years.  Industrial robots and computer technology replaced millions of high paying U.S. factory jobs in the 1980's through the 2000's.   Outsourcing jobs to foreign countries gets demonized for the loss of factory jobs, but just as many were lost to new technology.  Income tax software has replaced thousands of tax preparer and accountant jobs in more recent years.  These are just a few of the most obvious cases of new forms of technology replacing human jobs in the last 50 years.  

In 2013, researchers at Oxford University in England released this report on the future of work,, which predicted that 47% of U.S. jobs could be replaced by new technology between 2013 and 2038. I heard about this report, being a geek on economics and Big Picture social dynamics in 2017.  It blew my mind.  Yes, like everyone, I realized that new forms of technology had replaced millions of human jobs already, and would continue to replace human jobs.  But this report put an estimated number on that... a HUGE estimated number.  

The U.S. workforce is generally estimated at about 165 million of our 328 million total population.  Those are basically the people from ages 16-18, to age 65.  So the 2013 Oxford report predicted about  75-80 million Americans would use their jobs to new technology from over 25 years.  That's an enormous number of people.  Now you can argue the researchers' thinking and estimate.  But even if they're off by 20% to the downside, that's still well over 60 million people losing their jobs, through no real fault of their own, in a generation.  That's huge.  If the estimate is low, and the number goes higher, we get up near 100 million jobs losses in 25 years.  So I added this huge trend into my own Big Picture of where society is heading in my brain.   I even wrote about this is my blog (Steve Emig: The White Bear, June 28, 2017) in the summer of 2017.  This continuing loss of jobs to new forms of technology is a huge issue that almost no one seemed to be paying much attention to.  But it seemed to be an issue that would affect most people, in some way, at some point.  Plus, my career as a taxi driver went down the tubes when new technology (dispatch computers replacing the old CB radios), so I had experienced this first hand.  

As I blogged about the major recession or likely depression I saw coming (back in 2017-2019), I saw job loss from new tech as a major amplifying factor.  Since I geek out on these kinds of things, I tried to figure out possible solutions.  Yes, 75 million jobs will likely disappear over 25 years, but new tech will also create some new jobs.  But nowhere near enough.  Another option would be large new companies hiring massive numbers of people.  But most of our most valuable companies now employ relatively small numbers of people compared to the major industrial age companies of 50-70 years ago.  Amazon has 810,000 employees in the U.S., according to Wikipedia.  As we all know, Amazon is a behemoth in retail, and is coming up on its 27th birthday as a company.  Apple has 147,000 employees.  Google (aka Alphabet) has 135,000 employees.  Netflix has 9,400 employees.  Facebook has 58,000 employees.  Those are five of the most successful, valuable, major companies in the world today.  All of them grew exponentially in the last 20-45 years from nothing, due to the tech revolution.  Together they employ about 1,159,400 employees.  Even if they all double their workforce in the next 25 years, it would barely make a dent in the job losses.  The simple fact is, there will not be enough major businesses created to put 75-80 million people back to work.  

For about 2 1/2 years, early 2017 to 2020, I was trying to figure out what the best solution to this huge issue would be.  The only people who seemed to even think about this issue were smart people at the high tech companies themselves, and their answer was to push for a Universal Basic Income.  That's where the government gives every adult a check each month, say $1,000 a month.  But then, how does the government finance that?  Creating that much money would lead to massive inflation, and likely hyper-inflation, where those checks become almost worthless over a year or two.  

The best solution to this huge societal dilemma that I could come up with is to encourage tens of millions of Americans (and the same in other countries) to start small businesses.  In effect, people could create their own jobs.  This trend in micro and small businesses has been happening for many years now.  Think of eBay sellers, and all the freelance people doing work using the internet, and other new tech.  In fact, Amazon has 1.9 million resellers, who are small businesses, often 1 or 2 people in a garage, that work in conjunction with Amazon.  That's more than the big 5 companies have in actual employees.  

While no major corporation will come along to hire 40 million people, the idea of 40 million people starting a micro business (1 person business) is entirely possible.  Not easy, but possible.  If half of those businesses hire one person, that's 60 million people working.  The numbers become possible when new small businesses are considered.  After all, the U.S. began as a nation of farmers and shopkeepers, it's in our nation's DNA.  So that became what seemed like the best solution to me.  Then the economy began to tank in late 2019 (Repo Crisis, Sept. 2019).  Then Covid-19 hit the U.S. in February/March 2020, and withing 2 months, over 45 million people were out of work, although "temporarily."  About half have gone back to work, to some degree, since.  

Suddenly, this long term issue of job losses to new tech seemed very real.  But even now, few in business and politics are talking about this issue.  Everyone is betting on the false hope that the end of the pandemic will get everything going full bore again.  It will be better in in 6-8 months, but far too much damage has been done.  Far too many people, tens of millions, can barely make rent or mortgage payments right now.  And many major businesses are using the pandemic to find new tech to replace even more workers, and not hire them all back.  This is all on top of the fact that about 60% of U.S. jobs are fairly low paying service jobs, which no one can live well on, to start with.  

So for all these various reasons, I'm now focusing much of my personal writing and thought on getting my own business off the ground (I'm one of the tens of millions struggling), and helping small businesses  get more creative, use the internet and social media more effectively, and looking at how different people are creating small businesses in our ever changing, high tech enabled world.  So that's where I'm at.

As if this issue needed any more emphasis, I heard a presidential economic advisor say on TV that 400,000 small businesses have already closed down because of the Covid-19 pandemic.  So the U.S. has not only lost over 555,000 American lives to the pandemic, we've lost 400,000 small businesses, as well.  

We need MILLIONS of new small businesses  in this decade.  Got any ideas? 

Writing life: Weddington Park- the place where I found the flow in prose writing

 A jogger on the path in South Weddington Park, right below Universal Studios in Studio City, CA.  In 1991, nearly every morning for a few months, I would sit below the trees on the left and write whatever came to mind. That's when I really got going in the writing life.

When I got hired at BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines in 1986, I didn't think of myself as a writer, as weird as that sounds.  Many writers struggle for years, desperately wanting to "be a writer," usually meaning getting paid by a "real" publication to write something.  I got the magazine job, working at Wizard Publications, thanks to a BMX freestyle zine I self-published for a year in San Jose.  I started the zine as an excuse to meet the pro riders of the Bay Area in 1985, guys like Dave Vanderspek, Maurice Meyer*, and Robert Peterson, and kept doing it because I liked shooting photos.  I didn't think of publishing a zine as "writing," and a writer wasn't a cool thing to be when I grew up.  I was more into being a "rider," trying to become a pro freestyler at the time.  

But shooting photos of the NorCal crew was fun, so I kept publishing my zine.  I started with a Kodak 110 Instamatic camera, and a 1940's era, Royal, manual typewriter.  I may have lived five miles from the then young Apple Computers HQ then, but I was light years away in publishing tech.  I did move up to a 35 mm camera during that year of zine publishing, though, getting a Pentax ME Super.  Just enough so I never had to learn to work a light meter.

Out of nowhere came an offer to write a freelance article for FREESTYLIN', and a month after that first article was published, I was on staff there.  I was an editorial assistant, running errands for everyone, putting together BMX bikes to be tested, driving Windy, the photographer, to photo shoots, and proofreading both magazines.  Yes, at 20 years old, with only a diploma from Boise High School, and no college experience whatsoever, I was responsible for checking every word in two national magazines.  I stepped up my game, and did a pretty good job.  I even wrote a few articles.  But I didn't totally click with the other guys, and got laid off a few months later.  A couple months later they hired some BMX/skater kid from the east coast to replace me, a 17 or 18-year-old named Spike Jonze.  Whatever happened to him? Hheh, heh, heh, we had no idea then he'd become a media superhero.

I went on to edit and shoot photos for the American Freestyle Association newsletter for a year, got into video work, and landed at Unreel Productions.  Unreel was the video company owned by Vision skateboards and Vision Street Wear in the late 1980's, one of the "Big 5" skateboard companies then.  But the skating and BMX boom dropped off in 1989, and I stumbled into TV production, and wound up in North Hollywood, working second shift at a video duplicator, in 1991.  

I worked alone, making dozens of copies of random videos, like promo videos for automatic bowling lane sweepers, 4-hour videos explaining the different strains of corn to farmers, and boating navigation videos.  After leaving work at 1:30 am, I'd ride my bike back to the flop house where I rented a bed (not a room, the lower bunk bed) for $40 a week.  The place was cheap, close to work, and had about 12 roommates at any given time, several with prison records.  It was a decent place to sleep, but not so great a place to hang out all day.  

By that time, I was thinking of myself as a writer.  I just wasn't sure what I wanted to write, or how to get back to making money writing again.  The trick, it seemed, was trying to find out a way to get paid to write what I wanted to write.  So five years after being a paid magazine writer, then a newsletter writer, I was working on trying to "be a writer."  I did things backwards.

I was also a hardcore BMX freestyler, not a great one, but decent.  So I woke up late, and took off on my bike every morning, and rode around North Hollywood, Burbank, Studio City, and Toluca Lake, looking for cool stuff to ride.  I'd throw my spiral pad in my backpack, and sit down and write a while at a McDonald's or Carl's Jr..  

Within a week or two of my bike exploring, I found this quiet little park, just off Lankershim, right below Universal Studios.  Officially called South Weddington Park, there was a small hill on one end, with several medium sized trees.  I began to sit under one of those trees, day after day, and just write whatever came to mind.  I was 25 years old, didn't have a girlfriend, had about $7,000 credit card debt from a BMX video I self-produced the year before, and didn't have any friends up in the valley, except one co-worker.  So I was often depressed about the debt, bummed at life in general, and wandered on my bike alone exploring and street riding. With those themes in my life, I began to write what I hoped would be a really cool novel... or something.  It turned into more of a journal.  

While working at the newsletter in 1987, I dated a woman working there who was a singer in a local rock band, and wrote her own songs.  She's the one that kept telling me I was a writer, and finally got me to sort of, kind of, believe it.  I started trying to write song lyrics for her, hoping to write her a hit song, so we could both blow up and be rich and famous.  Instead, she slept with my best friend, I eventually found out, and she dumped me.   Yeah, I was pathetic, didn't dump her.  Anyhow, I wrote a poem that night called "Journey of the White Bear," where I was the white bear, the naive young guy. She was the "black leopard," a metaphor, since she was older, much wilder, a rocker and party girl, and had been around the block more than a few times.  It was the best poem I'd written.  After she dumped me, I realized that since I wasn't a musician, my "song lyrics" were actually poems, and I'd written a couple hundred of them by then.  I didn't show then to anyone until years later, they were notebooks hidden in a box in my closet.

So after writing hundred of sappy love poems, depressed loser guy poems, and some "what is life all about?" poems, I started writing in the mornings in Weddington Park.  I wrote A TON of crap there.  But every once in a while, I'd hit some idea, and the words would just burst out of me, as fast as I could write them.  My poetry writing had already turned like that, where I'd think about an idea for a poem for a few days, maybe a few weeks, and suddenly, it just started coming.  I'd learned from my poetry that I had to sit down, right then, at that moment, and write the poem.  If I didn't, the idea was lost.  

But at Weddington Park, I was consciously trying to write some kind of story, fiction, prose.  And I'd wander off into writing about random stuff, just journaling, much of the time.  But I kept writing.  And more and more, some cool idea would pop up out of nowhere, and I'd get a page or two, maybe three, of good writing.  I didn't know it then, but I was beginning to learn my own personal creative process as a writer.  

My notebooks from Weddington Park were lost in a storage auction, or maybe in a move, at some point.  I moved around a lot in the recession years of the early 1990's.  All that writing was lost.  But a few of those cool ideas stuck with me, and made it into my zines during that era.  More than anything, at Weddington Park, I learned to just keep writing, grind it out, and roll with the good ideas, the good pieces, when they seemed to appear out of nowhere. That was where I first started putting time in as a writer.

In my first poetry zine, self-published in late 1992, I wrote a line on the inside cover that came from my Weddington writings.  "These are not my words or ideas, I'm just the faucet the water flows through."  The best ideas, the best pieces of writing, seemed to simply flow through me, from some other source.  No, not ancient fucking aliens, but either from my sub-conscience, or some deeper mystical source, the universal consciousness, or whatever.  I later learned many writers, probably most serious writers, have similar experiences.  But that was new to me in those mornings at Weddington Park, now almost 30 years ago.  

Although the Universal Red Line train and bus station is now right next to (and under) Weddington Park, the park is very much like it was in 1991.  It's a quiet neighborhood park.  A few homeless people (not me) camp by it now.  It's a bit more fixed up, and there's a walk/jog trail around it.  Although I gravitated to this same area when looking for a place to land in 2019,  I rarely go there now.  But it's still a cool place to chill a while, play fetch with your dog, or to sit under a tree and write.  

 * I'm in the Maurice Meyer clip, at 5:07.

Why you need to "drive traffic" to your website or blog

These metal dinosaurs (and other sculptures) are out in the California desert.  I've seen videos of these, but didn't know there were 130 different sculptures.  These are in the Anza-Borrego park area, look up "Borrego Springs metal sculptures," to find directions.  Basically, they're in the middle of nowhere, west of the Salton Sea, and straight east of Carlsbad, California.

Why am I showing you a video of metal dinosaur sculptures out in the Southern California desert?  Because they are a great metaphor for building a website or blog for your business, art, or other projects.  When you build a website of any kind on the internet, it's pretty much in the middle of nowhere, out there in "cyberland," just like these dinosaurs. A random person here or there might come across it, but very few will.  

For over 20 years now, forward looking marketing people have been telling businesses (mostly major corporations) to promote their products and services online.  In the early 2000's, after the Dotcom boom and bust, most traditional businesses had websites built, as did many smaller businesses.  But they didn't put in the time, money, and staff into really learning how the internet, and now smartphones and apps, have changed the game of business.  These forms of communication have dramatically changed people's shopping habits.  So that means your business needs to adapt, if it hasn't already. 

Now, 20-25 years into a practical world wide web, aka "the internet," many major businesses of the Industrial Age are gone, or bankrupt, and most major businesses have some team doing online and social media marketing for them.  But a huge number of small businesses don't use all these "new" tools and platforms to anywhere near their full capacity.  

Having become a serious blogger in 2008 (after writing zines, and for magazines and newsletters since 1985), I've been learning how to operate as a writer today's world.  One of the big lessons I learned is that when you build a blog or a website (or an app), it's pretty much invisible.  It's not like opening a bricks and mortar store next to a busy road, where a lot of people will just stop in and check it out.  For any kind of website (business site, online store, blog, etc), you have to "drive traffic" to the website to get people to check it out.  This is still an often missed concept by lots of small businesses.  

Driving traffic means that you create content of some kind in other places on the web, social media, or phone apps, and you link them to your website.  You also can hand out physical flyers, or post signs in your physical store for people to check out your website.  You go on social media, in all its forms, and write posts, or post photos and videos, and link them to your website.  You find communities of people interested in what you sell, like on Facebook groups, for example, and you let them know about your website.  There are dozens of ways to drive traffic to your website, for free.  These are just the main themes.  You can also pay influencers on social media to mention your website, and send people to it.  You can place ads all over the internet, social media platforms, and phone apps, to get people to start checking out your website.  This is absolutely critical, to get people to see your work, and to sell through your website, online store, blog, whatever.  In time, some people will start telling others about your site, or it may even go viral within a large group.  That's what you want.  You want people to be able to easily find your website, and have it be interesting enough that they tell other people. 

So, in review.  Your website is a lot like these metal dinosaur sculptures out in the desert, when you first build it.  It may be cool, but no one knows it's there.  So you start building paths and roads (links) in the online world, to your website.  Like building a bunch of roads to these dinosaurs, so more people will see them.  That's the idea of "driving traffic."  When you build any website, you have to spend time, daily, if possible, to drive traffic to your website, to be successful at getting views, and making money if it's a business site.  Got it? More thoughts on this, and specific techniques, in future posts on this blog. 

The Importance of Creative Scenes

Me getting creative on my freestyle bike, underneath the Huntington Beach Pier, 1987.  Apparently I was too broke to get a haircut at the time. 

 

We've all heard of cities that have a good music scene or a great art scene.  But what does that mean really?  What is a scene?  While a lot people like to go see a live band in a bar or club, or check out a gallery of local artists, do these things really matter much?  Aren't art and music scenes just place where artists, musicians, hippies, weirdos, and other people who don't want to really work hang out?  As a kid growing up in the 1970's and 1980's, that was what I heard about art and music scenes.  

My own interest in what I now call "creative scenes" began in October of 1982.  I was in my junior year in high school in Boise, Idaho, and my family lived in a trailer park outside of town, that we called Blue Valley.  We weren't diehard trailer trash, my parents moved there to save money for a year or two, so they could buy a house in town.  Unlike most of their financial plans, that plan ultimately worked.  

But, over the summer of 1982 in Blue Valley, us teenage guys in the park got more and more into BMX riding, since there wasn't much else to do.  That fall, someone heard there was actually a BMX track in Boise.  Four of us packed into a Ford Pinto, with 3 bikes, to go check it out.  Scott, Rocky, and Brian all won trophies in their first races, while I watched and coached.  We were hooked.  The next weekend, we packed the whole posse, 9 or 10 of us, with all our bikes, into my dad's Ford van, and headed to the Fort Boise BMX track.  It was the last race of the season.  That day, something weird happened.  Us trailer park kids, with cheap, crappy, bargain store bikes, in blue jeans and T-shirts, with paper plate number plates, all raced really well, for our first or second races.  Every one of us went home with a trophy, most for 1st or 2nd place in our class.  The Boise track locals, on $400-$500, high end BMX racing bikes, in their fancy racing leathers, couldn't figure out who we were, where we all came from, or why we were all so damn fast, for newbies.  

For us in Blue Valley, over several months, BMX was our thing.  We had been going out to our little jumps on the edge of the desert, and trying to out ride each other, day after day after day.  I later realized, we had developed a BMX bike scene.  We were a small group of people, with one dominating common interest, who got together, (daily, in our case) to push each other to get better.  That's what I now call a "creative scene."  We weren't making art or music, but we were learning jumping tricks on our bikes, and trying to invent a trick or two.  Not super creative, but somewhat creative.  We raced each other, practiced carving through turns, and speed rolling jumps.  But mostly we tried to jump for style better than all the other guys. At that time BMX racing was a sport, only 12 years old, and BMX trick riding, an offshoot, was just morphing into a sport of its own, called BMX freestyle.  

As I got more into freestyle in 1983 and 1984, a sport born in Southern California, I began to hear of small groups of freestylers around the country, and later in Canada and the U.K.  The BMX magazines sometimes covered these little scenes, or sometimes kids got letters published in the magazines, about their local group of riders. BMX freestyle was about doing learning tricks on BMX bikes, and inventing our own tricks, and it was highly creative, as well as a physical "sport."  

As BMX freestyle grew, it seemed to pop up in small groups, in different places around the country.  Freestyle didn't grow evenly across the U.S., town by town, city by city.  After the original riders, like Bob Haro, Bob Morales, R.L. Osborn and Mike Buff, in the South Bay area near Los Angeles, groups of freestylers popped up in San Francisco, San Diego, Kansas City, Austin, New York City, and obscure places likeYork, Pennsylvania, Elgin, Illinois, small towns in New England, and the three of us in Boise, as well as couple dozen other places.  

One or two riders would see a factory team trick show, get hooked on the idea of BMX freestyle, and get a couple other people into it, and start their own trick team.  That trick team would do shows and spread the word of this weird little sport in their area, drawing more riders in.  I didn't realize it then, but along with trying to eventually become a pro BMX freestyler, by riding daily, I was also witnessing how a creative scene grows from a couple dozen people, to a worldwide sport and industry.  BMX freestyle was also a part of the larger action sports movement, spawned mostly by surfing and motocross, and including skateboarding, snowboarding, rock climbing, mountain biking, wake boarding, and other new sports.  Our weird little sport, credited to one person, Bob Haro, is now worldwide, on TV, the internet, and social media, part of the X-Games, and will demo in the next summer Olympics.  None of that was planned in the early 1980's, it just happened organically.  It started with high school age kids having fun on bikes. 

That's what "creative scenes" do, at times.  They start with one or two people, with some new idea involving some form or creativity.  It can be a new style of art.  The Impressionists, were a scene in their day, taking painting in a new direction.  It can be music.  It can be entrepreneurial, spawning a new business, or even a new industry.  It can be technology.  Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, creating the first Apple Computer to share with the local Homebrew Club, in San Jose, in the 1970's, that was both a technological scene (computer enthusiasts), and soon after, an entrepreneurial scene, Apple Computers (now simply Apple).  These scenes just kind of happen, and it's hard to engineer one to grow into a worldwide movement or industry.  Research centers in major companies and universities are attempts to create creative scenes, usually around technology of some sort, but with major business potential.  These centers of innovation come up with a lot of ideas, but most don't take off and go very far. Some do, and spawn new products, businesses, and industries.

The best scenes, judged by overall influence on society, just seem to happen, and they seldom happen where major corporations want them to.  Jobs and Wozniak borrowed ideas from corporations that were trying to create major technological breakthroughs, and then created the personal computer revolution in a garage, a few miles from highly funded research centers.  

Creative scenes don't have to spawn major businesses to be highly successful, influential, and beneficial to society.  The Beat Poets didn't become billionaires, but their initial small poetry scenes influenced a huge part of their generation, as did the Acid Rock bands and Hippie culture of San Francisco's Haight/ Ashbury District in the late 1960's.  Whether that was mostly a good influence or a bad influence,depends on who you ask.  A lot of great art, music, and things like meditation became popular as a result.  But then, hallucinogenic drugs became popular, also.  

Some creative scenes just give local creative types a place to try ideas, experiment, and become more creative people in general. Those scenes are incredibly important in the overall scheme of things.  Those are the "nursery" scenes where a lot of people, often afraid to try new ideas, find out, "Hey, I can make something interesting."  The kids who have good creative scenes, some organized, others totally unorganized, gain some confidence, and begin to get better at bring creative in general.  Often great creative people had little known scenes they were a part of early in life, that sowed the seed of using creativity on a regular basis.  Those seeds often blossom years later, in art, music, or other creative endeavors.   

Other creative scenes take root in a part of a city or town, and then attract more creative people, of various kinds.  Some creative scenes become legendary places in their genre's.  Think of Hollywood (a mile form me, as I write this), a major creative scene for movies, TV, and music.  Broadway in New York City is a legendary creative scene for live theater.  New Orleans is a famous creative scene for its culinary and music roots.  Nashville is the major creative scene for country music, and now all kinds of music.  Austin, Texas became a creative scene for music, followed later by art, movies, and high technology. When it comes to the business end of things, the world's most famous creative scene (and creator of billionaires) is the San Jose, California area, aka Silicon Valley, for computer related high technology.  

In the 1990's, as computer technology, and other tech began to take off exponentially, it became apparent that these new high tech businesses clustered in a few areas.  Silicon Valley/San Francisco Bay Area, Boston, Seattle, Los Angeles, Austin were the standouts.  The Raleigh Research Triangle (Raleigh/Durham/Cary) in North Carolina was the first major high tech campus area.  But Silicon Valley, and the others listed, sprang up faster and larger.  Dozens of other cities were trying to create and build high tech centers, but the best start-ups kept gravitating to these, and a few other cities.  

Professor Richard Florida, then at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, dove into the research on this phenomenon, trying to figure out why high tech firms clustered in certain areas.  After all, the rise of the internet, and personal computers, meant people could work from most anywhere.  After several years, he wrote The Rise of the Creative Class, in 2002, sharing his initial  findings (here's a speech from then).  While there were many reasons for this clustering, the underlying theme was that tech people were highly creative people, and creative people liked to be around other creative people.  The high tech workers creating the new technology liked to set up in cities that had good art and music scenes, and other groups of highly creative people, already living there.  They also liked to live in places that were tolerant of weird and unusual people.  Computer nerds really were mostly serious nerds then, and they'd been picked on enough.  So they migrated to places tolerant of all kinds of people.  That explains Austin, Texas as a tech hub, their city motto is "Keep Austin Weird."  

So while creative scenes can happen anywhere, and most live as small local scenes, some scenes spark a new idea that takes off in art, music, technology, or some other area.  Places with solid creative scenes in one area, often attract more creative people from other facets of the creative spectrum.  And these areas attracted tech workers, and still do.  So our most innovative cities and areas, that are now a huge part of the U.S. economy, and centers for most of our innovation, often started with tiny art or music scenes, decades ago.  Over years, they attracted other creative people, and became "scenes of creative scenes," inter-meshed with each other.  Some of these cities eventually became the tech hubs where most of the United States economy is now centered.  There are both good and bad aspects to this arc of creative scenes into known "creative cities", and into tech hubs.  Ask the old time locals in San Francisco, Seattle, or Austin about real estate prices, the Yuppie invasions, and often homelessness issues, as well. 

My point here is that a group of weird, screwball, seeming degenerates can be the seed of a great place for innovation in many different areas, and that can ultimately grow into major business ventures at times.  It's for this reason, and my fascination with Creative Scenes since that BMX race in October of 1982, that I'm focusing most of my time and energy on this concept in the coming months, and maybe years. 

We have a ton of major issues to work out in society right now, and creativity itself, new ideas and new solutions, are needed.  A handful of people, who just start doing creative things on a regular basis, usually come up with these new ideas that ultimately transform society in a meaningful way first in neighborhoods, then towns and cities, and then across regions and nations.  Those little creative scenes, the ones that will transform our lives in the next 10-20-30 years, could be happening ANYWHERE right now.  

While forcing creative scenes rarely seems to have good results.  Creative  scenes CAN be nutured as they grow.  Our country needs that right now.  Pretty much everywhere.  I'll have lots more insights and ideas on art, writing, creativity, and creative scenes, in coming blog posts on this blog.

Thoughts on failure

This video takes a while, but ultimately this guy pulls up a good sized vase, it's off center, and it finally wobbles and goes splat.  Is this a failure?  My best friend in high school, a guy named Darrin, got me into pottery, and we came up with a different take on failure while throwing pots on the wheel.

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I have a much different view of what "failure" is, than most people.   This started with throwing pottery while I was in high school.  At the beginning of my junior year at Boise High School, in Boise, Idaho, a guy named Darrin and I hated our small, half size lockers, and we went looking for a couple of open, full size lockers to take over.  We found two, side by side, and became best friends as the year went on.  Being one of the best pottery students at the time in our school, he got cleared to go into the pottery room at lunch, to throw pots on the wheel.  I started going in and hanging out with him, and he soon taught me how to throw pots on a wheel.  

Making pottery on a wheel is a weird idea.  You start with a wet lump of what it basically mud, and on a good day, you have a vase, a pot, a jug, a spittoon, or a bowl when you finish.  Once you get the basics down, it's just a lot of fun to create pottery on the wheel.  As we threw pots and talked during lunch hours, Darrin and I talked about the different results of a session at the pottery wheel.  We would sit down each time with some really cool vase or jug idea in our mind.  That was the goal for the day.  

The thing with clay is that you have to continually add water to it while working on the wheel.  So as you center the clay, open the hole in the middle, and then pull up the walls of the initial cylinder, the clay gets softer and softer.  You can see that process in the video above.  All the while, you need to keep the clay cylinder centered, and push the limits of that hunk of clay.  

If you let the clay get off center, or it gets too soft, it wobbles and the top part falls.  Usually you can catch it, and cut the top part off with a needlepoint, and there's still a chunk left on the wheel.  There's not enough clay to make a cool shaped vase, jug, or large bowl.  But even after losing the top part of the cylinder, you can make a spittoon shape.  If you keep pushing the clay, and the spittoon flopped, you still had enough clay to make an ashtray.  OK, this was the 80's, and we all knew people who smoked, and you could always find someone to give the ashtray to after it was fired and glazed. 

If you totally screwed up on the pottery wheel, and couldn't even make an ashtray, you scraped the little hunk of clay left off the wheel.  Was that a failure?  Darrin and I debated this.  Every time we sat down at the pottery wheel to make something, it was fun.  Most of the time we didn't end up with the cool shaped vase or jug we wanted to make, it was still fun.  Darrin and I came to the conclusion that there was no "failure" when working on a pottery wheel.  The worst case scenario was that we scraped the clay off the wheel when done, and  called it a "learning experience."  So our four stages of making pots were: Vase, Spittoon, Ashtray, and Learning Experience.  There was no failure, the worst that happened was that we had fun, and learned something that would help us the next time.  

With my year and a half of throwing pots in high school, my concept of what failure had changed.  I was getting seriously into BMX freestyle at the same time, where that new idea of failure also came into play.  Some days I landed my tricks well, some days I didn't, but still had fun.  Either way, the long term trend was continual progression.  In BMX freestyle I really learned how important failure is to eventual success.  BMX freestylers, skateboarders, all the action sports people, as well as many mainstream sports, spend much of their time "failing," missing their tricks, in order to further improve and perfect their physical skills.  "Failure" is what action sports people do every day, so they can later do incredible tricks and stunts, often for a crowd, a video camera, or at a contest.  

Getting used to "failing," and making it part of the process, in art, action sports, or many other things, the fear of failing diminishes, which opens us up to more creative ideas, in many cases.  

But I've also worked on TV crews, hanging lights as a roadie type guy, and at Cirque du Soleil, where people could get seriously injured, maybe even killed, if someone failed at their job.  When you're holding a belay rope for someone climbing up a 32 foot high climbing wall, for example, failure is not an option.  But most of life falls somewhere in between, usually a lot closer to the pottery level.

About 90 days ago, I got a good-sized chunk of money from the pandemic unemployment program.  My goal was to get the best deal on a room to stay in (since I was homeless then), and I'd have 60 to 90 days to build some kind of business to support myself, which would take a $2,500 to $3,000 a month of income.  That's a tall order.  Guess what, I failed.  Then money got shut off long before I expected, the best deal on a room cost me a ton, but it was during a full pandemic shutdown mode.  I did manage to write a 250 page ebook during that time, and sold 50 copies inexpensively.  But I had banking issues, couldn't get my online store fully functional, and now I'm back close to where I was 90 days ago, financially.  Failure.  

I don't know anyone else that has started a business, and had a cash flow they could live off of in 90 days, but I couldn't manage it.  What I have learned from years of "failing" and successes, like throwing pottery on a wheel in high school, and years of learning freestyle tricks on my bike, is that the next step is what matters.  I've learned to get back up and keep going after a "failure," no matter how big or small.  I do my best to turn it into a learning experience.  Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't.  But in the long run, persistence usually pays off at some point.  Keep on keeping on.  That's where I'm at... after a BIG learning experience.  And hey, I've been wanting to write an actual book my whole life.  OK, it was electronic, and not earth shattering by any means.  But 250 pages qualifies, I've written my first book.  So in a big "failure," a kernel of future success, perhaps.  Onward.

Stolen Bike parts, Cheap Bike parts, and Team Payless

Stealing's bad.  We all know that.  But nearly everyone has stolen something at some point.  Mine is pretty much limited to free refills at fast food joints in desperate times, but stealing is stealing (unless you're Wall Street, then it's cool).  I'm against stealing bikes bike parts, but I've had one or two stolen parts on my bike back in the early days, so I can't pretend I've always been above it.  Besides, this is a great song by Jane's Addiction.

As I've written several times, I got into BMX riding in a trailer park we called Blue Valley, outside of Boise Idaho.  It was the summer of 1982, there were about a dozen of us teenage guys in the park, and not a lot to do.  We all had cheap BMX bikes, and a little "track" on the edge of the park.  It had two berms, roosted by a motorcycle rider couple years earlier, and 4 small jumps.  We just started spending more and more time in the evenings riding our bikes, and less playing football, basketball or throwing rocks at each other.  

As we got more into BMX riding, we started breaking bike parts.  Goosenecks, as we called stems back then, were often the first to go.  When we broke something, like a gooseneck or a pedal, or bent a sprocket, that created the problem of replacing it.  For things like pedals, we could often find somebody who had a rubber-style pedal off an old ten speed or kid's bike, to buy for $2 or something. But the more expensive parts, like the goosenecks, forks, handlebars, and rims, cost $40 or more.  That meant we had to come up with a fair amount of actual money. 

There were three main ways to make money as a teen, in a trailer park, outside of town in 1982.  Mowing lawns, babysitting, or selling drugs.  The drugs were mostly sold by the older guys (20-somethings) in the trailer park, or by kids at school.  None of us were really into drugs then, a few kids smoked a bit of weed, but that was mostly it.  It was a trailer park, in the desert, where the grass was dry, yellow, and grew really slow.  Blue Valley was mostly lower middle class working people, with some poor trailer park-stereotype White Trash people mixed in.  Nearly everyone mowed their own lawns.  Sometimes you could mow lawns for one of the older couples and make $5 a lawn.  But getting more than 2 or 3 lawn mowing jobs a week was the best anyone could manage, and that was only if one of us was trying to make money that week.  None of us had our own cars, and we were 7 or 8 miles outside of Boise itself.  Getting a "real job" for $3.35 an hour wasn't a viable option for most of us.

So that left babysitting.  The standard pay for babysitting kids at Blue Valley in 1982 was $1 an hour and all the government cheese you could eat, no matter how many kids.  Seriously, that's what we made.  I only liked cheese on pizza, and the government wasn't giving out free mozzarella.  The whole government cheese program was to help struggling dairy farmers.  Anyhow, the couples who went out usually were gone for 2-3 hours.  So it took a lot of babysitting jobs that paid $3 and a chunk of cheddar, to buy a new set of handlebars or even a sprocket.  Like broke kids everywhere, we improvised.  

At first we bought many of our bike parts at Payless.  That was a drug store, similar to a Walgreens, CVS, or Rite Aid today, but they had a little more everyday merchandise.  There was a toy aisle that had really cheap bike parts at one end.  There were also no security cameras in those days.  I was way to scared to steal bike parts, I was always afraid of getting into any kind of trouble.  I was in enough trouble from my mom day after day for normal teenage stuff, like forgetting to take out the garbage.  But a couple of the guys at the trailer park didn't mind snagging free stuff, like in the Jane's Addiction song above.  I honestly forget who stole what, but a cheap gooseneck or two, and quite a few inner tubes and patch kits got snagged from the Payless our families all shopped at.  

One kid realized that you could take a 26 inch, thorn proof inner tube out of the box in the store, and pack about 12 normal, 20 inch tubes in the box. The 20 inch tubes were $1.99 or something, and the thorn proof tube was $3.99, I think.  So a couple of the kids would pack the big, thorn proof boxes, and get twelve $2 inner tubes for $4, saving $20.  Those guys quickly became the inner tube suppliers for all of us.  

I think every one of us from Blue Valley had parts from Payless drug store on our bikes at some , most of them bought, in 1982.  When we went to our first race, as a group, at the local Fort Boise BMX track, some local rider asked where we came from.  Suddenly there we were, this sketchy group of 9 or 10 young guys, in Levi's, T-shirts, and with paper plate number plates.  But we were all pretty fast for new riders.  One of our crew told the Fort Boise locals, "We're Team Payless."  The funniest part is that a few kids actually believed that we were sponsored by a drug store.

As we kept breaking cheap Payless parts, we upgraded to what became our local bike shop, Bob's Bikes (and lawnmower repair), on Overland Road in Boise.  A big trend in BMX components at the time was "anodized" aluminum parts.  This was colored aluminum sprockets and chain rings, pedals, hubs, and stems.  Anodized parts came primarily in red, blue, black, and gold.  In this Old School BMX bike clip, you can see anodized parts on bikes #1, 2, 6, 7, 8, and 10.  Red and blue anodized parts were the most popular, and black was a bit less popular then.  But nobody (who actually had money) wanted gold anodized parts.  So one of the guys from Blue Valley went to Bob's to get a sprocket.  He came back and told us he got $3 off on the disc (inner part of the sprocket, that you bolted the chain ring to), because it was gold anodized.  Immediately, gold anodized components became a theme at the Blue Valley jumps.  We bought the ugly gold parts nobody else wanted, usually for 10% to 30% off. I had my gold anodized Diamondback gooseneck for 2 or 3 years.  My dad later took it to the shop where he worked, and had it bead blasted, which left it a raw, silverish, aluminum color, which looked cool, way better than anodized gold.  A couple riders asked me about it at the track, I old them it was a rare, silver, limited edition stem or something.  But it was the same gooseneck I had the week before, just with the gold color blasted off. 

The sketchiest cheap bike part story from Blue Valley came when a new family that moved in.  They bought the trailer right next to the basketball court, where we all met up to go ride, after supper each evening.  Summer days were hot in Boise, so we watched TV or played video games all day, and ventured outside in the late afternoon or evening.  

The new couple had two young boys, about 6 and 7 years old.  Both kids had brand new, K-Mart bought, BMX bikes.  So we spent a few days riding out at our jumps, all with cheap bike parts on our crappy bikes, while the two new little kids rode in front of new mobile home on brand new bikes.  In typical trailer park fashion, one or two of our crew got jealous, those bike got stolen out of their unlocked shed one night.  Two nights later, their dad came out to talk to us teen guys, while we were riding our bikes around the basketball court.  

We all came together, sitting on our bikes, as he told us that his kids' bikes just got stolen a couple nights earlier.  "Man, that sucks!" one of our group replied.  We talked about having bike parts stolen, from time to time.  We told him he should lock the shed, and we thought high school kids from in town came out to steal stuff every once in a while.  None of our bikes had the bright chrome frames his boys' bikes had, so he said he knew we didn't steal them.  But he asked us to keep an eye out for their bikes, and let him know if we heard any rumors about who stole them.  Obviously, they guy thought one o fus had stolen the bikes, and someone else would soon rat them out.  

We assured the guy we would keep an eye out for the bikes, and he thanked us and walked back into his trailer.  Every single one of us had parts of those stolen bikes on our bikes as he was talking to us.  I had one of the pairs of pedals.  Honestly, I felt really bad about that one.  But he bought his kids new bikes about a week later, the guy had a good job.  I don't actually know which guys in our group stole the bikes, but the parts were sold by 3 or 4 guys the next couple of days.  The frames for those two bikes are still at the bottom of the Blue Valley pond, covered in muck and duck poop, as far as I know.  

By the time spring melt happened in 1983, and we could ride our jumps again, we all still had cheap frames, but they were built up with decent quality components.  One day Rocky and Scott decided to ride all the way into Boise to check out a new video arcade.  It was about an 8 mile ride each way.  They made it back after dark, and told us about it the next day.  They told us it was a really cool arcade.  They also told us they met a couple of guys there with brand new, name brand BMX bikes.  They asked the guys how they made enough money to buy such expensive bikes.  Buying a $400 bike with the typical, $3.35 an hour job would take a long time.  Those kids, who lived in a poor neighborhood, told our guys that their old bikes got stolen.  Because their parents had renter's insurance, they got a check to replace their old bikes, and were able to buy brand new bikesmore expensive than the first ones.  That was the first time I heard about trailer park economics, I think.  

Not surprisingly, looking back, Scott and Rocky got their bikes "stolen" at the arcade a couple weeks later.  In those couple of weeks, they just happened to have listed all the parts on their bikes (with a few serious upgrades), and found out that their parents also had renter's insurance.  Sure enough not long after, the insurance bought Scott a Panda with Araya 7X rims, Redline Flight Cranks, and other top name parts.  I never could figure out why Scott bought a Panda frame, of all things.  But it was a good bike.  Rocky went totally first class, getting a brand new Diamondback Harry Leary Turbo, the coolest race bike out, as far as we knew.  Here's Harry Leary doing his his thing on his Diamondback in the UK, coming in 3rd behind Tommy Brackens.  

After seeing, and riding Scott and Rocky's bikes, several guys talked about getting their bikes "stolen" for a while, but no one did.  Scott and Rocky always swore their bikes actually got stolen, but that arcade was right by the Boise River.  None of knew for sure what happened.  But those bikes may have wound up in the river, so they'd never be recovered.  None of us ever knew for sure, except those two, and they kept to their story.  

At the time, the idea of scamming insurance to get a free bike didn't seem like a big deal.  In the many years since, I've seen how prevalent scamming of all kinds is in poor communities (and wealthy ones, too), and that's why many insurance premiums are so high.  It'd be cool if nearly everyone could make a decent living, and this type of scamming would largely die out.  But I'm writing this during the Covid-19 pandemic, when tens of millions of Americans are simply struggling to survive, pay rent, and eat, and most major corporations are alive today because of record setting bailouts last year, and in 2008-2009.  About 30% of the American public get some kind of help form the government at the moment, myself included.

My parents moved back into Boise in early summer of 1983, and I was able to mow a few lawns, and do odd jobs, to keep my bike running from then on.  I wound up buying my Skyway T/A frame and fork set with my high school graduation money, in the spring of 1984.  But in the summer of 1983, the Blue Valley guys quickly faded from the BMX racing scene, and I rode largely by myself day to day that year, and started getting more into the emerging thing called BMX freestyle.  

I just wrote a 250+ page ebook about getting into BMX in the trailer park, all the way up to when I stumbled into the BMX industry in 1986.  I got a job at BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines, which changed the direction of my entire life, for the better.  

This story of struggling to get parts to keep our bikes running that first year is one of the chapters I left out of the ebook.   I know nearly everyone had their struggles to buy bikes and parts in those early years.  I wrote this post, reminding us all of those early sketchy days when most of us got a bit shady to keep riding, from time to time.  Hopefully most of you have moved past that shadiness, and left it to the guys offering1985 Redline Flight Cranks for $7,000 a set on eBay now.  

You can learn more about my Freestyle BMX Tales ebook, including how to order one, at this link:

Freestyle BMX Tales: Idaho Dork to Industry Guy